On the surface, Victoria Sinis is indistinguishable from so many other marketing professionals.
Young, vivacious, and personable, the twenty-something Australian seems like she does PR for a cosmetics company or a trendy tech startup.
But Sinis’ job was something else entirely. For eight months, she trolled social media sites for girls who seemed underage or “barely legal,” and coaxed them into posting explicit content on OnlyFans.
The job was easier than it may seem. All she had to do was lie.
“If we had approached them with the truth and said, ‘Hey, do you want to sign up to do porn? We’ll take 20% of your income. You’re probably not going to earn a lot. You’re going to have to do some really extreme things. You’d be like, ‘No!’” Sinis told The Daily Wire.
Instead, she and the other recruiters messaged potential porn performers about their positive “vibe,” and invited them to lavish parties on yachts or fly them in to stay at villas in exotic locales.
Recruiters “show girls this lifestyle, and then say, ‘Would you like to be an OnlyFans creator and maximize your earnings?’” Sinis says.
While influencers parade high-rise apartments and luxury vacations on social media, the average OnlyFans creator earns about $180 a month.
“There’s a cultural myth that you can just sell feet pics and buy a Mercedes,” Sinis says. “But it’s a full-time job for very little return. We had girls post 20 videos a day across five accounts. We had SEO experts, lighting setups, even script templates.”
Sinnis worked at an OnlyFans agency, one of thousands of such companies that have sprung up to exploit both performers and their customers, who believe they’re purchasing access to these women.
While precise statistics are hard to come by, it has been estimated that there are roughly 3,000-5,000 such small agencies globally, and around 300-500 larger, more established agencies with significant client rosters and operations. Along with the 20% they pay to OnlyFans, managed performers also have to fork over a hefty commission of their usually meager earnings to them.
The existence of these agencies reveals the demand for adult content on OnlyFans, which was launched in 2016 with the promise that it would allow celebrities and influencers to monetize their content by selling it directly to fans.
At first, OnlyFans did not allow “not safe for work” content. But the platform lifted that prohibition in 2017, and the adult performers began flocking to the site. As COVID lockdowns fueled digital consumption in 2020, that trend only grew.
Today, it’s estimated that between 70% and 80% of OnlyFans’ 3 million creators are considered “not safe for work.”
Sinis joined her agency shortly after graduating with a marketing degree. She’d been working in hospitality, but when some friends approached her to join their company, she thought it seemed harmless. And she enjoyed working with her clients, women her agency euphemistically called “content creators,” many of whom she describes as funny and sweet.
As a recruiter, Sinis was tasked with convincing young women who had already built up a following posting risqué photos on Instagram or TikTok to take it one step further to overt “sex work.”
Her employer had a very specific target in mind.
“We recruited based on how young [the women] looked,” Sinis told The Daily Wire. Because girls who looked like they could plausibly be labeled “teen,” “fresh 18,” or “barely legal” made the most money, she and her fellow recruiters cold-messaged girls who looked underage or newly-adult and dazzled them with promises of potential wealth.
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TikTok channels like The BOP House (short for Baddies on Point), which features a host of OnlyFans girls living in an L.A. mansion, boasting of their seven- and eight-figure earnings, have helped make the pitch easy. Convinced that they can earn massive incomes selling their bodies, some young tween and teen girls, Sinis says, are already filming pornographic content to prove their “experience” to OnlyFans recruiters, hopeful they might one day occupy the digital successor to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion.
What recruiters don’t mention: these girls won’t make much at all, unless they’re willing to film the most explicit and extreme content.
At Sinis’ agency, creators were asked what “level” of content they were comfortable filming. The scale ran from posing in lingerie (Level 1) to “everything but anal” (Level 4), and finally, violent sex and other hardcore acts (Level 5).
“Very quickly, we dropped Level 1 because it didn’t make money,” she says. That meant all the girls they recruited pretty much started at Level 2 — implied nudity. The recruiter’s job was to convince the women to advance through the levels.
“It isn’t, ‘You must do this,’” Sinis explains. “It’s more subtle than that. We would say things to the girls like, ‘This custom request for some explicit performance is worth $500. Are you sure you want to pass that up?’”
“We call it consent but really we were slowly wearing the women down. When a girl would say no to a custom video, and then get offered $1,000, we would continue to push them with, ‘Hey, we’re just checking in. Totally up to you though.’ But it’s not. It’s coercion.”
Some custom requests weren’t even sexual — just dark. One man, for instance, wanted a fake video of a man hanging off a ledge while a woman stepped on his fingers. These darker requests were what finally caused Sinis to question the work she was doing.
“When virtual sadism doesn’t cut it, what’s next — real violence?” she asks. “We are feeding violent, sexualized fantasies. And then we’re surprised when those fantasies spill into the real world.”
After visiting a church service one weekend and thinking of all the women she helped bring into porn, she tendered her resignation.
“I was crying every day, unable to open my laptop when I got to work,” she says. “I kept asking my coworkers, ‘Do you think it’s okay, what we do?’”
What they do is feed delusions — not just to the women they recruit, but to the men who subscribe.
OnlyFans’ appeal is that, unlike other pornographic websites, it allows subscribers to have a seeming personal interaction with performers. But subscribers who “chat” with performers often aren’t interacting with the women on screen.
“We hired chatters, cheap labor from the Philippines, who worked 12- to 16-hour days pretending to be these women,” Sinis says. These workers are given scripts and trained in the “girlfriend experience,” keeping men emotionally tethered, often believing they have genuine relationships with the creators.
“It plays on male loneliness, on their emotional vulnerability,” Sinis tells The Daily Wire. “We exploited men for profit just as much as we did the women performing.” This included training the “chatters” on upselling custom requests.
Sinis believes these men, often married or isolated, aren’t paying for explicit content so much as the sense of intimacy and validation it gives them.
“I had a guy tell me he thought he had a real connection. I had to break it to him: it’s all scripted. You’re talking to a stranger, quite possibly another man, on another continent.”
Nowhere are these false relationships more harmful than with young men. Children, on average, first see pornography at age 12, though some are exposed to explicit content as young as seven. Studies show that rising pornography consumption is fueling an epidemic of emotional withdrawal, and causing a sharp drop in dating and relationships among Gen Z males.
“I met a 13-year-old boy in Georgia who broke down in tears telling me he watches porn and no one knows,” Sinis recalled. “The shame, the secrecy — it’s soul-crushing.”
Since leaving the industry, Sinis has begun to consider how we might roll back the damage that porn is doing to society. As someone who’s been on the inside, her prescription for change isn’t limited to legislation, though she supports age verification laws like those passed in Utah.
Instead, she advocates for cultural revolution: equipping parents, educating children early, and building a counter-narrative that emphasizes the importance of marriage, family, and faith.
“We need to stop shaming young men and women, and start attacking the real enemy: the $97 billion porn industry that’s consuming them both,” she says.
“This world has light and darkness,” Sinis said. “And OnlyFans feeds the darkness.”
